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I am assuming the product owner role during our Scrums and we have just completed our Sprint 0. Now that we have developed a detailed backlog of user stories with acceptance criteria for each story, my question is "what is the best practice" for writing a 'general acceptance criteria' to be added to a contract. For example, site loading speed, search speed, architecture, etc. What do you think would be a 'must' add to any contract.

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Supported browser? – dzieciou Dec 17 '12 at 9:55
I understand, it will fixed price contract, not time and material contract? – dzieciou Dec 17 '12 at 9:56
Actually no, its not fixed. We created the backlog so that we could estimate time/effort/cost, but this may change as we go forward (agile dev). What would be great at this point, is to have a list of things to look out for while developing. Any ideas or links? Here's what I was thinking: what are reasonable load times for a site (ie For this site), what search performance should be applied, and so on. – Zigster Dec 17 '12 at 11:25
I assume your organization -- and not the contractor -- will be responsible for maintenance. – user246 Dec 17 '12 at 15:18

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Zigster, as regards site loading speed and search speed, I would add non functional requirements at the user story level. They can be expressed in the form of acceptance criteria. For example if one user story is:

As a customer I want to run a search based on product name So that the products with matching name will be displayed

Among the acceptance criteria you could specify: The search results are displayed to the customer within 3 seconds

In other user stories where for example you might be doing a checkout you will be defining the max time you consider acceptable for the customer to perform such action.

I would not define such acceptance criteria at the site level but at the user story (value) level, this will encourage the development team to build performance tests early and at that specific level.

As per the architecture, what do you mean, do you want to impose a specific architecture?

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i agree that this could be done at the acceptance criteria level. so how would you tie this to the contract performance. meaning, if the dev team accomplishes 90% of users stories, but half-asses the 10% (that might be important to overall app), how do you ensure they will improve that 10% to an 'acceptable' level. should we not keep a 'performance bar' for the app that needs to be met? – Zigster Dec 18 '12 at 9:28
Good question zigster! If you have a user story that includes an acceptance criteria that says: "The search results are displayed to the customer within 3 seconds" this will be part of the acceptance of the user story and if it is not met even though all the functionality is included you should not accept it. This would mean that 0 user stories have been delivered. I hope this is clear, feel free to ask more questions if I didn't cover all you need. – Gus Dec 18 '12 at 22:39

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